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Posts Tagged '2015'

The week in review. All the IBM Cloud and SoftLayer headlines in one place.

Welcome to the Masters
If you’re not practicing your swing this weekend, you’re watching the Masters. Over the next couple of days, professional golfers will seek their shot at landing the coveted Green Jacket. And while everyone might be watching the leaderboard, IBM will be hard at work in what they are calling the “bunker,” located in a small green building at the Augusta National Golf Club.

And for those that can’t line the greens to watch your favorite player, IBM is utilizing the lasers the Golf Club has placed around the course to track the ball as it flies from hole-to-hole. Learn more about the golf-ball tracking technology here.

Open Happiness
In a move to streamline tech operations and cut costs, Coca-Cola Amatil is partnering with IBM Cloud to move some of its platforms to SoftLayer data centers in Sydney and Melbourne—a deal sure to open happiness.

"The move to SoftLayer will provide us with a game-changing level of flexibility, resiliency and reliability to ramp up and down capacity as needed. It will also remove the need for large expenditure on IT infrastructure." - Barry Simpson, CIO, Coca-Cola Amatil

Read more about the new CCA cloud environment and the five-year, multimillion-dollar deal.

Bloomberg sits down with Bob Picciano, IBM Analytics Senior VP, and David Kenny, The Weather Company CEO to discuss what makes this different than other companies that have analyzed the weather in the past. Using Watson Analytics and the Internet of Things, the partnership will transform business decision-making based on weather behavior. Read how IBM’s $3 billion investment in the Internet of Things will collect weather data from 100,000 weather stations around the world and turn it into meaningful data for business owners.

New SoftLayer Storage Offerings
Last week, SoftLayer announced the launch of block storage and file storage complete with Endurance- and Performance-class tiers. The media was fast to report the new offerings that provide customers more choice, flexibility, and control for their storage needs and workloads.

“Twitter provides a powerful new lens through which to look at the world. This partnership, drawing on IBM’s leading cloud-based analytics platform, will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data. This is the latest example of how IBM is reimaging work.” – Ginni Romety, IBM Chairman, President and CEO

Last week, an estimated 21,000 IBMers, SLayers, customers and partners from around the world flooded Las Vegas, Nev. to attend the first-ever IBM InterConnect. This new conference combined three popular IBM conferences (Impact, Innovate and Pulse) into a single, premier cloud and mobile techno-topia.

What our engineers and developers did in Las Vegas after conference hours might have stayed in Las Vegas, but IBM’s InterConnect hits and announcements didn’t. Here’s a recap:

Speed to Market Wins the Cloud Computing Race
Everyone likes to go fast, and the new senior vice president for IBM Cloud, Robert LeBlanc, likes to go super-fast. “What I’m focusing on is speed,” LeBlanc says.

In this blink-and-the-market-changes world, time-to-market determines the winners and losers in cloud computing. Part of LeBlanc’s strategy is opening new SoftLayer datacenters. If you haven’t heard the news, SoftLayer will be launching Sydney and Montreal data centers in the next 30 days — with more coming soon. Stay tuned for more locations.

Cloudy skies on the horizon—that’s a good thing!
Our CEO, Ginni Rometty, announced a $4 billion investment on cloud services (shared with the data analytics and mobile businesses). She’s hoping that the investment will spur $40 billion a year in revenue come 2018.

In fact, hybrid was a big theme at InterConnect. “We are going to make all those clouds act like one,” says Angel Diaz, vice president of IBM cloud technologies. IBM cloud (powered by SoftLayer) will be a one-stop shop: a cloud superstore with a smorgasbord of aaS offerings.

It looks like it’ll be an exciting ride for IBM over the next couple of years. Make sure to keep up with the headlines for more announcements in the coming months.

This year IBM is taking three amazing conferences and merging them into IBM InterConnect. With all the activity going on over the five days, the search for SoftLayer can be a serious undertaking. So spend more time enjoying the conference and less time flipping through your event guide. Here’s a rundown of everything you need to know to keep up with us.

SLayer Sessions at IBM InterConnect

SLayers are leading sessions all over InterConnect. We've cut out all the noise so it’s easy for you to slip our sessions into your conference agenda. What do you need to know? You’ll find it here.

dev@InterConnect

If you’re looking for developer-focused topics within IBM Interconnect, we’ve got you covered. dev@InterConnect is a developer’s two-day dreamland—from a slate of developer-focused sessions to firsthand training, and even a Developer Playground where you’ll get to play with some of the hottest tech toys. As an added bonus, you will find the Server Challenge there too. Try your hand at re-racking the servers and plugging in the cables—fastest time wins a MacBook Air.

End dev@InterConnect with a bang at the Gaming Bash we are sponsoring with Cloudant. Join us for bites, beverages, and be ready to game. Prizes and swag will be up for grabs; you just have to put your skills to the test.

IBM Cloud Experience Zone

If you find yourself with some free time at Mandalay Bay, swing into the Solution EXPO and make a b-line for the IBM Cloud Experience Zone. That’s where you’ll find your resource for all things SoftLayer. If you have questions about SoftLayer, our SLayers will be there to answer them. If you just want to see what we’re all about, we’ll be there running live demos.

Rock @ IBM InterConnect

After a packed conference, we hope you’ll be ready to rock! IBM InterConnect and Rocket are giving attendees a VIP worthy event with a performance from Aerosmith.

Go to the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Wednesday evening to party from 7:45–10:30pm. The event is included for InterConnect and dev@InterConnect attendees. Just don’t forget to bring your badge; it’s your ticket in!

Sohonet Delivers Cloud for Rendering
Sohonet has signed on to IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer IaaS platform to provide its extensive network of film and media companies with the compute and storage resources they need.

Additionally, SoftLayer CTO Marc Jones recently met with members of the European press during a recent visit to Germany, France, and the U.K. Click here to read some of the key stories covering his visit.

As cloud technology moves into 2015, the pace of innovation in the cloud space continues to accelerate faster and faster. Being no stranger to innovation ourselves, we’ve got our collective finger on the pulse of what’s up and coming. Here are some trends we see on the horizon for cloud in 2015.

Hybrid cloud

As more and more workloads move to the cloud, many companies are looking for a way to leverage all of the value and economies of scale that the cloud provides while still being able to keep sensitive data secure. Hybrid cloud solutions, which can mean an environment that employs both private and public cloud services, on- and off-prem resources, or a service that combines both bare metal and virtual servers, will continue to grow in popularity. With 70 percent of CIOs planning to change their company’s sourcing and technology relationship within the next three years, Gartner notes that hybrid IT environments will dominate the space as they offer many of the benefits of legacy, old-world environments but still operate within the new-world as-a-service model.

In 2015, the term bare metal will be officially mainstream. Early on, bare metal servers were seen as a necessity for only a few users, but now it has become the ideal solution for processor-intensive and disk I/O-intensive workloads like big data and analytics. We’ve been in the business of bare metal (formerly called dedicated servers) for 10 years now, and we’re happy to see the term become a standard part of the cloud dialogue. As cloud workloads get tougher and more complex in 2015, companies will continue to turn to bare metal for its raw performance.

Security

Security has been a hot topic in the news. In 2014, major retailers were hacked, certain celebrity photos were leaked, and issues surrounding government surveillance were in the spotlight. More than ever, these incidents have reminded everyone that the underlying architectures of the Internet are not secure, and without protections like firewalls, private networks, encryption, and other security features, private data isn’t truly private. In response to these concerns, tech companies will offer even higher levels of security in order to protect consumers’ and merchants’ sensitive data.

Big data moves from hype and buzzword status to mainstream. The cloud industry has seen a change in the way big data is being put to work. It’s becoming more widely adopted by organizations of all types and sizes, in both the public and private sectors. One such organization is the Chicago Department of Public Health, which is using predictive analytics and data to experiment and improve food inspection and sanitation work. The city’s team has developed a machine-learning program to mine Twitter for tweets that use words related to food poisoning so that they can reply directly to posters, encouraging them to file a formal report. We’ll see much more of this kind of smart application of big data analytics to real-life problems in the year to come.

Docker is an open platform for developers and system administrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications. It enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. Streamlining workflow, the Docker software container allows developers to work on the exact same deployment stack that programmers use and contains all the dependencies within it. It can also be moved from bare metal to hybrid cloud environments—positioning it to be the next big thing on the cloud scene in 2015. IBM has already capitalized on Docker’s simplicity and portability by launching its IBM Containers service, part of Bluemix, last month. IBM Containers will help enterprises launch Docker containers directly onto the IBM Cloud via bare metal servers from SoftLayer.

The medical and health care industries will continue to adopt cloud in 2015 to store, compute, and analyze medical data as well as address public concerns about modernizing record-keeping and file-sharing practices. The challenge will be keeping patients’ sensitive medical data secure so that it can be shared among health care providers, but kept safely away from hackers.

In order to comply with local data residency laws in certain regions, many global companies are finding it necessary to host data in country. As new data centers are established worldwide, it’s becoming easier to meet data sovereignty requirements. As a result of launching new data centers, cloud providers are increasing the size and power of their network—creating even lower latency connections—and creating an even more competitive cloud marketplace. As a result, smaller players might be left in the dust in 2015.

Last, but certainly not least, 2015 will see an aggressive move to the cloud by enterprise organizations. The cost- and timing-saving benefits of cloud adoption will continue to win over large companies.

Looking Ahead
Martin Schroeter, senior vice president and CFO, finance and enterprise at IBM has projected approximately $7 billion in total cloud-related sales in 2015, with $3 billion of that coming from new offerings and the rest from older products shifted to be delivered via the cloud.

SoftLayer will continue to match the pace of cloud adoption by providing innovative services and products, signing new customers, and launching new data centers worldwide. In Q1, our network of data centers will expand into Sydney, Australia, with more to come in 2015.